I love pretty things

a 1955 soviet poster by artist Nina Vatolina,presenting glory to the soviet woman, as a competent, equal political actor and a deputy who serves the people.

but why? because no adult in my life saw children as people. i was thing, dragged along to show off how good my parents were. anything different needed to be hid. i was forced to attend school where i was bullied, othered, talked down to, harassed, or ignored otherwise. i had no choices, no way of standing up for myself, because it punished if i did. and i was punished over and over again.

i was hit, i was verbally abused for two decades by my immediate and extended family, and i was sexually abused by my older brother before i was allowed to understand what was happening.

children desperately need rights. they need the power to say no and have that be backed up by a system that will support them. i didnt want to kill myself, i wanted to escape my family and there was no other option available to me. i isolated myself for years because of the abuse i faced and many more never made it past their suicide attempts.

children need rights so that the rampant and plain-as-day abuse they face can have a chance of being stopped. when children have somewhere they can go, away from their families and abusers where they have a guaranteed bed to rest in, when children have the knowledge they need to identify when they're being abused, when children arent forced into labor by parents, guardians, or companies, when children arent forced to say yes to adults, when children have the freedom to express themselves, when children have the freedom to choose who they are and transition,

WHEN CHILDREN CAN SAY "NO"

when i asked whether their autistic classmate's meltdown was dangerous or merely uncomfortable, they said, "i felt like i was in danger!"

yes you should, actually. that's life. upsetting things happen. no one should have to experience any discomfort. but we do. we get stung by bees and sunburns and headaches. we live in bodies in the world.

autistic people are human beings who have the right to exist in society, including during meltdowns. having one class of your entire semester interrupted by a singular meltdown is not anymore of an infringement upon your entitlement to education than having your class interrupted by a fire alarm or cancelled for a snow storm.

one of my peers once experienced a cardiac event 10 minutes into class. it was terrifying. it was desperately upsetting. i was contacted by the school and offered counseling afterward because i happened to be the one who managed the situation until paramedics arrived. no one should have to experience their classmate being hauled off in an ambulance, but it happens. everyone was worried about my classmate first and foremost, and then about me. no one blamed anyone, and certainly when my classmate happily recovered and returned to school, no one thought they should be removed from the program.

especially for the comfort of "well behaved" ID/DD people

the time when i was young and a girl came up to me and started playing with my hair so i started crying and all the abled adults went quiet and started acting like she was a bomb they had to defuse and eventually literally swept her up like she was a load of laundry and carried her out

i've seen 2 disabled people manhandled out of a room for "misbehaving", and been the one manhandled out myself too

there's a part in the ugly laws: disability in public by susan schweik about seizures which makes a point i want to add onto:

"consider this account, written by charles henderson in 1906, of what happens if a member of the public sees an epileptic seizure:

(quote:) in sociable intercourse the epileptic is an object of dread, and no one who has witnessed the person in a convulsion can quite escape from the haunting memory of the spectacle and entirely free his mind from terror or disgust. hence there cannot be that free, unconstrained, and natural converse which gives pleasure to society. (end quote)

[...]

this kind of thinking, to which the ugly laws have obvious links, often goes along with a certain kind of understanding of the public sphere. public space, in this model, is pedagogic space; what you allow in public is what children learn is allowed in public. if you allow unsightliness a foothold, the next generation will be even uglier. to display something publicly is to spread it."

start being comfortable posting Black people's words in your blogs, the same way you'll reblog posts about transness, gayness, disability, because these specific topics can affect you

it occurred to me that the bizarre and nonsensical idea that trans women transition to escape accountability, as if such a gambit could ever work, serves to offer a convenient explanation for this pattern that allows us to continue hating the tranny guilt-free even after we notice the pattern. the reason the transition and the accusation arrive around the same time is because her entire transition is a disingenuous gambit to escape the accusation! now, not only do we have permission to misgender her, we can take her transition itself as further proof of her guilt!

This is so fucking funny.